Neurophilosophy Challenges the Strategic Use of Moral Reasoning: A Review of Churchland's Braintrust

Questions
at issue: 1. Where do moral sentiments come from? 2. Are the biological origins of moral
sentiments relevant in evaluating moral norms and the motivated reasoning of
moral authorities?

“We need a critique of moral values, the value of these
values themselves must first be called in question—and for that there is needed
a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which
they evolved and changed.” Nietzsche, Genealogy
of Morals, ¶6.

Critical
investigation into the disturbingly non-transcendent origins of morality is not
new.Evolutionary and neurological
investigations have been trickling out of the academy and into the popular
press for a couple of decades. However, these have so far produced more
reaction than consideration, both in the general public and among academics. If
anything, prevailing beliefs about the origins of morality have been wrapped in
anti-scientific rhetorical defenses, most of which deny out-of-hand that
science could make any contribution to the formulation of personal ethics or
public policy.

No
stranger to the bulwarks constructed to shield the humanities from empiricism,
neurophilosophy pioneer and academic blockade-runner Patricia Churchland offers
perhaps the strongest and most concise defense of the interdisciplinary study
of human morality. Churchland’s 2012 book Braintrust:
What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality focuses on the deceptively simple
question of where values come from. Though the question is not significantly
different from that posed by Nietzsche, its 21st century incarnation
cannot be answered by speculative aphorisms. To refine the question and
establish a methodology for answering it, Churchland constructs two mutually-reinforcing
arguments, one scientific and the other philosophical. In the scientific
argument, Churchland proposes that our feelings about social responsibility, self-restraint,
etc. may have emerged from the neurochemical reward system that ensures
parent-child bonding in all mammals. The philosophical argument, equally
important and skillfully interwoven with the scientific argument, is that
rhetorical attempts to exorcise science from the discussion of moral norms and
public policy are logically indefensible.

Neuro-Morality

The second,
third, and fourth chapters of Braintrust
contain the groundwork for a hypothesis of brain-based pro-social behavior. Churchland
points out the nontrivial point that morality is inherently social. While I may
like to believe that I would act according to a particular ethos even if no one
was watching, the fact that I want other people to applaud my integrity manifests
its social utility. Living in a group is evolutionarily adaptive, but it
requires a mechanism to constrain self-interest in order to ensure group
cohesion. Churchland examines the evolutionary history of neural systems which extend
the instincts for self-preservation, first to offspring and genetic relatives,
and eventually to the social group composed of both genetic kin and non-kin on
whom the individual depends for survival and reproduction. Churchland is
particularly interested in the role of neurochemicals, especially oxytocin and arginine
vasopressin, in constructing emotional bonds between parents and children,
parents and parents, and even allo-parents caring for offspring that are not
their own. Citing studies involving a range of animal species—rats, rhesus
monkeys, even fruit flies—Churchland explores the powerful, if complex,
influence of oxytocin and vasopressin on animal behavior. Her favorite
exemplars of the social effects of neurochemistry are the monogamous prairie
voles and their promiscuous cousins, the montane voles.Not only do the two species seem to differ in
little more than their brains’ stocks of oxytocin, but artificially increasing
the oxytocin levels in the montane vole turns players into family men—just as
reducing oxytocin in prairie voles brings on a seven-year-itch. While
demonstrably influential in bonding behavior, such neuropeptides are not
simple, one-cause-one-effect agents. Male rats who receive a shot of oxytocin become
tender toward in-group members, but they simultaneously become hostile toward
intruders. Oxytocin does not turn an individual into a universal altruist so
much as it extends the individual’s self-promoting instincts (somatic effort) to
family and, potentially, to immediate community. Just as parental affection may
be expanded into care for others, the child’s feelings of attachment to the
mother expand to create fears of social isolation in the adult—the origins of
shame and approval-seeking. “Depending on ecological conditions and fitness
considerations,” Churchland contends, “strong caring for the well-being of
offspring has in some mammalian species extended further to encompass kin or
mates or friends or even strangers, as the circle widens. This widening of
other-caring in social behavior marks the emergence of what eventually flowers
into morality”(14).

As the social
circle expands to include non-genetic relatives, brains that evolved with
greater social intelligence yielded an adaptive advantage.

Expanded memory capacities greatly enhanced the animal's
ability to anticipate trouble and to plan more effectively. These modifications
support the urge to be together, as well as the development of a ‘conscience’
tuned to local social practices; that is, a set of social responses, shaped by
learning, that are strongly regulated by approval and disapproval, and by the
emotions, more generally. More simply, mammals are motivated to learn social
practices because the negative reward system, regulating pain, fear, and
anxiety, responds to exclusion and disapproval, and the positive reward system
responds to approval and affection. (15-16)

In other
words, culture, like morality, emerges from brain systems that have adapted to
form cooperative social units.The norms
as well as the individual’s receptivity to those norms both depend on a brain
that is wired to care what other people think. In the fourth chapter,
Churchland surveys the specifically human variables influencing or constraining
social behavior, from market complexity to institutionalized religious identities,
all of which depend on an interaction between internal (neural) and external
(cultural) components. Churchland explores the impact of neurochemicals that
influence the more reflective phenomenon of “theory-of-mind” in social
cognition. The “human” social phenomena of cheating, punishment, hierarchy,
cooperation, and philanthropic grand-standing have a surprising number of
parallels in studies of animal behavior. In the sixth chapter, Churchland
identifies brain areas (particularly the prefrontal cortex [PFC]) integral in
the sort of predictive social thought needed to create and preserve extended
networks of cooperation. While it is the seat of human reflective
consciousness, the PFC is not an organ of perfect rationality. Churchland
proposes that our focus on the moral or immoral actions of others (including essentialized
cultural and religious identities) serves a primarily strategic purpose—shared
morality is a means of predicting another’s behavior. As such, it is a heuristic
engine. We distrust those who don’t share our moral prejudices, even when their
beliefs can be shown to be more mutually beneficial than our own.

Qualified language

Any book
that attempts to communicate the findings of cognitive science to the
non-specialist is bound to trick some readers into making untenable
over-generalizations about the scientific evidence or its implications. However,
Churchland carefully separates what in the study of moral origins can be
empirically studied from what cannot. She is reductionist in this sense, but
not in the sense that the general public uses the word (meaning a sort of intrusive
cynic who does violence to the transcendent object under study). She also
inserts qualifying statements which discourage the reader from jumping to
single-cause explanations (e.g. “oxytocin causes morality”). She reminds us
that in even the simplest questions regarding the neural correlates of
morality, “the answers are certainly going to be complex, even in voles, since
the neurons affected are part of a wider system, meaning that what is going on
elsewhere—in perception, memory, and so forth—will have an impact” (50). “Single
genes seldom have big effects, but are part of multinode gene networks, and
part of gene-brain-environment networks with recurrent loops”(53).“[I]f a certain form of cooperation, such as
making alarm calls when a predator appears, has a genetic basis, it is likely
to be related to the expression of many genes, and their expression may be
linked to events in the environment”(102). These statements are the dry, qualified,
scientific versions of the humanists’ reminder of the roles of culture and
experience in individual development. Churchland goes on to question the
hypotheses of cognitive scientists such as Marc Hauser and Jonathan Haidt,
whose propositions about human morality are based on empirical evidence but
might exceed the parameters of the particular data. She even challenges claims
by neuroscientists Marco Iacoboni and Giacomo Rizzolatti, whose research in
mirror neurons has promoted a great deal of speculation about the nature of
empathy and imitation. Whereas mirror neurons have been assumed to cause one
individual to understand another by first understanding her/himself, Churchland
argues that the causal order could actually be reversed—that mirror neurons
function primarily to simulate another’s action to enable the individual to
predict or imitate it. Rather than beginning as self-representations, mirror
neurons may be necessary in creating self-representations from observed
experience. While the reader might make the simplified observation that
Churchland plays the proper role of philosopher by carefully analyzing logical
inconsistencies in scientific hypotheses, the fact that her counter-arguments
are equally grounded in empirical research should lead us to ask why we ever
began to think that philosophy and science were different disciplines.

The Naturalistic fallacy fallacy

Framing
her scientific argument, Churchland crafts a philosophical argument directly
engaging the common claim that science has no place in the discussion of ethics
or public policy. This claim takes various forms. Some forms are little more
than tautological “semantic wrangles,” such as “only humans have human morality,” or the assumption that
morality requires reasoning and reasoning requires language, therefore only
humans are moral.One common argument
politely demonizes scientific approaches as “scientism,” a vaguely-defined
crime that serves to do little more than distinguish “us” (humanists/theologians/policy-makers)
from “them” (scientists and interdisciplinary traitors like Churchland).Another tactic exploits a passage from David
Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (3.1.1.27)
that has been decontextualized and over-simplified to say “you can’t get an ought from an is,” (i.e. moral conclusions are not based on factual premises). Such
mixing of factual arguments with moral ones was dubbed the “naturalistic fallacy”
by philosopher G. E. Moore. We may think of plenty of cases in which such a
transition would, indeed, be fallacious. We commonly assume that something that
is “natural” is, therefore, “good,” and “unnatural” is bad, until we come
across obvious exceptions such as naturally-occurring influenza and its unnaturally
manufactured vaccine. This is clearly an example of fallacious reasoning. But,
as Churchland illustrates, there are plenty of cases in which moral arguments
that are logically consistent but heedless of the facts of nature prove to be
too presumptuous and abstract to find any consistent implementation in reality.
Even the most popular rule-based morals fail in practice, not so much due to
human frailty as to the frailty of rule-based reasoning, itself. As Churchland
demonstrates, even the Golden Rule cannot function as a rule without a host of
prior, unexamined assumptions to guide its interpretation. It also carries some
unrecognized consequences. If a self-mutilator wants others to find the same salvation-through-pain
that he does, is he morally obligated to torture them? The Golden Rule has a
function, but not as an a priori rule.According to Churchland, the Golden Rule primarily serves to activate
empathetic, pro-social behavior already rooted in our evolved neuroanatomy, not
in any set of rule-governed cultural norms. Proposed categorical imperatives by
Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, John Rawls, and Peter Singer have similar
problems. The idea of rules, like the idea of reason, is the problem. It
creates an imagined antecedent that is not, ultimately, its origin. As
philosophers from Aristotle and Mencius to Hume and Nietzsche recognized, our
reflective rules are ad hoc generalizations. Churchland cites the now-famous interview
of Georgia congressman Lynn Westmoreland by Stephen Colbert. Westmoreland
vociferously advocated the inclusion of a graven image of the Biblical Ten
Commandments in a Louisiana courthouse because, he insisted, those commandments
are the origin of all morality. Despite this, the zealous congressman could
only recall three commandments, and those in highly abbreviated form. Unsurprisingly,
the three he recalled (“Don’t murder…don’t lie…don’t steal”) are featured in
law codes predating the Bible, such as Hammurabi’s Code and the Laws of Manu,
not to mention isolated cultures across the globe that have had scant contact
with the West and none at all with Judaism or its offshoots. Churchland’s
argument is that, instead of denying or lamenting the ad hoc nature of
morality, we will achieve more substantive moral progress by admitting and
systematically studying the evolved neurological structures that precede our
discursive norms.

The Evolution of Bioethics

The
relevance of Braintrust is not
limited to the academy or the armchair. If the is/ought distinction is unduly exaggerated in moral philosophy, it becomes
a weapon in the sphere of public policy—an excuse to defund or severely
regulate research that does not reinforce popular prejudice. After all, what is
at stake is the power to shape and regulate the behavior of others, and
maintaining that power depends on popular appeal rather than empirical evidence.
Churchland seems to have learned this political truth in 2008 when she
presented a paper to George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics.

The council
was already notorious
as an ideological star chamber established to construct an intellectual façade for
the administration’s war on stem cell research. With a few exceptions (including
Michael Gazzaniga, who seems to have adopted a curious methodological
relativism), the council was composed primarily of Right wing political
pundits, such as Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer, rather than research
scientists. The council was originally chaired by Leon Kass, who was appointed
shortly after the publication of his anti-cloning essay, “The
Wisdom of Repugnance” (The New
Republic, June 2, 1997, 216.22). In this essay, Kass appeals to
inarticulate emotional reactions, not only as a justification for banning
scientific research, but as a justification for dismissing reasoned arguments
which contradict those emotional reactions.

We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings […] because
we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things
that we rightfully hold dear. [… R]epugnance may be the only voice left that
speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls
that have forgotten how to shudder.

Not only
does Kass use a gut reaction to argue for the implementation of government
policy, he uses it to divide the in-group from the out-group, the moral from
the “shallow souls.” Kass’ argument exemplifies, perhaps deliberately, Hume’s
claim that reason is the slave of the passions. At the same time, it abdicates
any pretense of prioritizing reason over gut feeling.

As chair
of the Council on Bioethics, Kass removed any “shallow souls” who would not
ratify the Council’s foregone conclusions—most famously molecular biologist and
Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn, one of only 3 research
scientists on the 18-member council. Though Kass was eventually replaced by
Edmund Pellegrino, the council’s strategy remained dependent on ad hoc arguments
and emotionalistic platitudes, particularly the malleable abstraction of “human
dignity.” After bioethicist and council member Ruth Macklin publicly
pointed out that the term “dignity” served only as a rhetorical red herring, the
council, in an effort to salvage its own credibility, invited papers from
philosophers, theologians, lawyers, physicians, and politicians, which were
published as the report, Human
Dignity and Bioethics. Though a handful of bioethicists, such as Churchland
and Daniel Dennett, tried to explain the nature of Macklin’s argument, most of the articles
(including one by Leon Kass, himself) aimed to ratchet up the emotional valence
of the term rather than clarify precisely how it justified a government ban on life-saving
research.

Churchland’s
contribution to the report, “Human
Dignity from a Neurophilosophical Perspective,” may have been the germ of Braintrust. Besides calling attention to
the neural origins of moral sentiment, Churchland describes the tragic history
of “misplaced moral certitude.” She points out that past advances in medical
technology, including vaccination for smallpox, anesthesia for use in surgery
and childbirth, dissection of corpses, organ donation, and blood transfusion
were all initially prohibited by religious and political authorities with
similar moral certitude (and “wisdom of repugnance”) at the cost of tens of
thousands of preventable deaths. The loss of life in these historical examples bears
its own emotional valence to those who see human suffering as a greater harm
than rule-breaking. More importantly, they serve to undermine the is/ought dichotomy by juxtaposing moral
norms with the measurable, real-world consequences disregarded by tautological,
ought-ought moralizing.

In the council’s
published report, Churchland’s essay is followed by a reply
from council member and theologian Gilbert Meilaender. Rather than engaging
the tenets of Churchland’s argument, Meileander simply launches an ad hominem
attack on Churchland, herself, for “breath[ing] a spirit of condescension.” Rather
than qualifying or refuting Churchland’s evidence, Meileander denies her right
to cite it. Like Kass, Meileander appeals to sentiment as a power greater than
reason and claims that if Churchland does not feel the same disgust a Catholic
feels at HPV vaccinations or stem-cell research, she is therefore unfit to
question them. “Unless and until one is capable of that,” Meileander demands, “the
most dignified thing to do would be to remain silent.” In other words, only
those who share the same foregone conclusion are allowed to question its logic
or implications. Conspicuously, Meileander invokes the term “dignity” in an
attempt to silence Churchland, proving her (and Macklin’s) original
point—“dignity” like “wise disgust” is not a reason but a rejection of reason
and testable evidence in moral arguments. What Meileander forgets to mention is
that this emotionalistic certainty which is immune to rational criticism drafts
public policy and impacts the lives of thousands, if not millions of people
with Parkinson’s disease, cervical cancer, and other potentially preventable
diseases. Neither Meileander nor Kass inquire into the gut feelings of those
crippled by these diseases, nor do they invoke “human dignity” in their
defense.

By openly exhibiting
and even prioritizing the same sorts of behavior observable in monkeys and rats,
professional moralists like Kass and Meileander prove Churchland’s argument in
the very tactics they use to attack it. Moral arguments begin with evolved, brain-based
heuristics which precede and structure conscious reasoning. This does not make
them bad or good, but it makes them deceptively convincing when they are at
their most self-indulgent. The most highly educated modern human is
all-too-capable of ignoring evidence and abandoning reason whenever he feels like it. More importantly,
moralists don’t seem to regard these feelings, themselves, as needing
explanation. This is as problematic in the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas (whose
empathy-based morality famously failed to
find real-world application in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) as it is in
the theology of Gilbert Meileander or the punditry of Leon Kass. Since demands for
“ethics in science” can be a smoke-screen for imposing irrational restrictions
on scientific research and its ability to save and improve lives, we might at
least counterbalance the ethics of
science with a science of ethics.
By investigating the cognitive and evolutionary origins of moral sentiment, we
do not invalidate that sentiment in policy discussion. Sentiment is inextricable
from human thought. Rather, the science of ethics imposes a burden of proof on
those who would exploit isolated anecdotes to evoke irrational emotion and then
leap to non sequitur generalizations which would regulate the lives of others. It
requires us to factor in actual outcomes, such as the loss of life that follows
from denial of treatment, instead of assuming that Providence will protect the
righteous.

The
introduction of these new criteria will require a reevaluation of those who
have been designated as moral authorities. Recognizing the all-too-human (or
mammalian) motivations of moralists naturally prompts a reevaluation of trust,
and it is with the question of trust, particularly when it comes to the
formation of institutions like the Bioethics Council, that Churchland concludes
Braintrust.

[W]hat kind of regulations should govern stem cell research?
To begin to make progress on that question, one has to know quite a lot of
science—what stem cells are, what about them makes them suitable for medical
research and therapy, what diseases might be addressed using stem cell
research, and what objections might be raised against it. (204)

These are
simple questions, but they illustrate the false dichotomy of is and ought. While these questions do not exclude moral philosophers, theologians,
or arm-chair commentators, they do introduce new requirements for
methodological rigor, predictive accuracy, and accountability in a discourse
which has traditionally relied on ad hoc reasoning and sensationalist anecdotes.

As
research into the structure of the brain progresses, questions about
brain-based morality are going to become even more common and more heated. Recently,
President Barack Obama introduced the BRAIN Initiative, a project akin to the
Human Genome Project. Assisting him with this introduction was NIH Director Francis
Collins, who is serving as de facto director of the BRAIN Initiative in its
early stages. In the past, Collins has not been shy about his belief in the
metaphysical origins of moral judgment. Explaining
his book, The Language of God: A
Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins explicitly bars moral
cognition from scientific study, implying that some sort of social collapse
will follow if we get too inquisitive:

After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house,’
the human brain with all of its neurological complexity, God gifted humanity
with something special that makes us different from all the animals, the
knowledge of good and evil, the Moral Law, with free will, which is not an
illusion, and with a soul. ... If the moral law is just a side effect of
evolution, then there is no such thing as right or wrong, good or evil. It’s
all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked by natural selection into thinking that
there is such a thing. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really
prepared to live our lives within that worldview? (2008)

The answer
to that last question would be equally well put to Collins, himself. A
geneticist and professional administrator, he is new to neurobiology, and it
remains to be seen if his stated beliefs will conform to the evidence or if he
will follow in the footsteps of morally-certain policy makers like Kass and
Meileander. For neurophilosophers, the short answer to Collins’ question is “Yes.”
Collins may not like Churchland's thesis in Braintrust,
but it is precisely because the people who hold the purse strings for scientific
research frequently share his dichotomized view that Braintrust is a very timely and important argument.